Year 12 Advanced level Economics introduces students to the different branches and to the different schools of thought that exist within the discipline. There are 2 units in Year 12: Unit 1: Markets and market failure Unit 2: The National Economy Students will be introduced to microeconomics and macroeconomics. Year 13 Microeconomics focuses on how individual markets allocate resources, and also how they sometimes fail to do this. Macroeconomics is the study of the bigger economic picture focusing on issues such as inflation and unemployment and how various institutions, such as national governments and central banks, try to manipulate the macro economy for the benefit of us all. There are a further 2 units in Year 13: Unit 3: Business Economics and the Distribution of Income 20 Unit 4: The National and International Economy Why Study? Students who study economics will find it a fascinating subject because it enables them to reflect on what is going on in the world around them. One Economist said that Economics ‘is a study of mankind in the everyday business of life’. It has a high status with top universities. Economics revolves around the central economic problem; that is, our infinite wants compared to our scarce resources. Scarcity of resources means that we have to make decisions about what to produce with our resources, how to produce the goods that we have decided to produce and how to distribute what we have produced; who gets what?